Originally Posted by
Chukbacca
Thanks so much for sharing! Thank you for the great detail you shared as well! This is very similar to what I was envisioning. I was pleased to read that you used steel, I never was very successful at aluminum welding and I am not keen on exclusively using fasteners.
Most aluminum is so soft after welding, that pound for pound steel is much stronger. Unless you can heat treat.
BTW the tongue design shown in my original post was a failure. If I leaned the bike over far enough, ground clearance was inadequate over bumps. And the sloping arm broke off the kickstand on a sharp turn. The fix looks a bit kludgy but works great. I hauled home 3 steel fence posts, 2 boxes of cat litter, a 6 pack of paper towels and a weeks supply of food for 2 adults and 3 large cats on Tuesday. And if there was any flex in the tongue, it was not noticeable on hills. It's a good thing I enjoy welding, there is a lot of bead in the chassis now.
